Surrender UN veto powers

Amnesty International yesterday urged the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to give up their power of veto in cases where atrocities are being committed.

In its annual report, the rights group said the global response to an array of catastrophes in 2014 had been shameful.

Amnesty's report said that 2014 had led to one of the worst refugee crises in history, with four million Syrians displaced by war and thousands of migrants dying in the Mediterranean.

The group criticised the response of European leaders to the crisis.

The outlook for 2015 was bleak, the group added.

Saying that 2014 had been a catastrophic year for victims of conflict and violence, Amnesty said world leaders needed to act immediately to confront the changing nature of armed conflict.

Salil Shetty, the organisation's secretary general, said in a statement that the United Nations Security Council had "miserably failed" to protect civilians.

Instead, the council's five permanent members - the UK, China, France, Russia and the US - had used their veto to "promote their political self-interest or geopolitical interest above the interest of protecting civilians," Shetty said.

Part of the solution would be those countries surrendering their Security Council veto on issues related to mass killing and genocide, Amnesty added.

Last year, the veto was only used twice in the UN Security Council. In March, Russia vetoed a resolution condemning as illegal a referendum on the status of Crimea and in May Russia and China blocked a resolution condemning Syria.

But many draft resolutions proposing tough action to deal with crises never reach the voting stage because they would almost certainly be vetoed, says the BBC World Affairs correspondent Mike Wooldridge.

The Amnesty report argues that if the use of the veto in the Security Council had already been restrained in the way the report suggests, that could have made it impossible to block UN action over the violence in Syria.

Amnesty also used its report to urge governments to adhere to a worldwide agreement on arms. A global treaty came into force last year and aims to regulate the arms industry by controlling the supply of weapons to criminal groups.

Syria barrel bombs keep falling: HRW

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch accused Syrian government of dropping barrel bombs on hundreds of sites last year, violating a UN Security Council resolution.

The group said it had documented at least 450 locations targeted in the southern province of Deraa and another 1,000 in Aleppo in the north alone.

Barrel bombs are large cylindrical containers filled with explosive.

In an interview with the BBC two weeks ago, President Bashar al-Assad denied his forces used barrel bombs. But Human Rights Watch said evidence it had collected through analysing satellite images, photographs, videos and witness accounts contradicted Mr Assad's assertion.

HRW says the attacks had a "devastating impact on civilians, killing or injuring thousands of people".

On Sunday, the Syrian Network for Human Rights reported separately that 6,163 civilians, including 1,892 children and 1,720 women, had been killed in barrel bomb attacks since 22 February.